TidyBlog

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Category Archives: Blogging

Twitter is an incredibly useful tool which can be used to help boost your business to higher levels, but if you aren’t aware of the best practices then you won’t be able to unlock the full marketing potential available to you.

As with anything that’s as lucrative as Twitter is, people like to figure out the way it works and how to gain the most benefit from using the platform. This leads to research which you can take advantage of to help your numbers soar, using the Twitter machine correctly to increase the amount of interaction on your posts. It’s all about boxing clever – if there’s statistics out there which identify the best times for you to send out your tweets doing the opposite isn’t going to help you get the level of interaction that you’d like to see in return for you efforts.

So let’s crack into the numbers and find out how you can be efficient in the way you tweet.

Hashtags

When it comes to hashtags the most important aspect is research, there isn’t any point in using a hashtag that’s had no traction over the past 12 months. Make sure people will see it and it’s worth your time placing it into your tweet. On top of making your own searches to find out information there are tools such as http://hashtagify.me/ which gives data on specific hashtags and those relating to it.

If you’re creating your own hashtags there are a few must do’s to make sure they work. Make you hashtag short and concise, being straight to the point is a necessity here. It should also be recognisable and easy to follow.

Hashtags can either work for or against you. They’re great for getting your tweets found through searches and hook you into conversation topics but becoming hashtag happy can actually have an adverse effect to your tweet. One or two hashtags can significantly boost your user tweet, tweets with hashtags see twice the amount of engagement than those without but engagement in tweets that use more than two hashtags actually drop by 17%. #dontgetgreedy

Timing

Time can play a big factor in the engagement your tweets see. “Busy times” are the best times for you to put out your content, between 8AM and 7PM is where the largest engagement of tweets is to be found. This time period sees an increase of 30% than between 8PM and 7AM. Statistics show that the weekend is also a good time to send tweets, people are obviously using their downtime to browse Twitter as a spike in engagement of 17% is found over weekdays.

Another timing factor is frequency, over tweeting can become harmful to your brand. Putting out too many tweets in a short period of time can turn off users from your feed and even lose you followers. To make sure you keep on top of this it may be use for you to create a schedule for your tweets, knowing when to send out a tweet and what content it’ll include in advance can be a great time saver and make sure you don’t fall into the traps of over or under tweeting.

Wording

Keep your tweets conversational, the best type of tweet is one which is professional but not overly formal, making sure to exclude business jargon from you posts. This kind of tweet is something a user would be more likely to interactive with by replying, retweeting or favouriting.

The type of words used can also have a large impact on the viewer of the tweet, for instance imperative words telling the user to do something like ‘look’, ‘see’ or ‘make’ work very well. Including superlatives is also a good way of ‘bigging up’ your content and drawing eyes towards your tweet and helping push people towards clicking the containing links, try adding phrases like ‘the best’, ‘the most’ or ‘blow your mind’.

When it comes to the amount of words you may have 140 characters to use but it’s been found that using 100 characters is actually the optimal number for a tweet. As with your hashtags, keep your tweets direct, concise and to the point.

Content

Images are extremely useful in boosting engagement on your tweets, including an image to a tweet can draw in 2 times the amount of engagement than those without. In a sample of 100 tweets the tweets with images saw 18% more click-throughs, 89% more favourites, and 150% more retweets. Those numbers speak for themselves.

It’s also worth directly asking for retweet, it may go against you initial thought but the numbers show that asking a user for a retweet does in fact work. Asking for a ‘RT’ can see your retweets increase 12 times, if you spell out ‘retweet’ you could reach up to a mammoth 23 times your normal retweets! For such a large boost this tactic is only used by 1% of Twitter users. Give it a shot and see how much on a increase you see.

Connections

If you’ve got a large Twitter following you can use this to help create connections with bloggers, if you see a blogger writing articles about the field you are in you can create a partnership where in return for solid backlinks from a reputable blog you can share their feature with your twitter base. It’s also a well you can return to because both parties are happy with the results they see, more exposure for them, better SEO rankings from the backlinks for you! A real win-win scenario.

Here is a base for you to work on for making tweets that are well received and return great engagement. Test these initial pointers on your upcoming tweets and see what improvements you can gain, add in your own research down the line and you can become a tweeting great.

Evening all, it has been a while! Tonight I thought it a good idea to write a quick blog post, something to say “hi, Tidy Design is still here!” and “thank you clients old and new, you have been keeping us very busy!”

Tidy Design – Guest Speakers at ASSIST-CKD

Testing 1 2 3 – getting ready to present…

Since I last sat down and wrote a blog post so much has happened, it is hard to know where to start. We have designed and launched several new sites, worked with Kidney Research UK to develop some life changing software, taken on a few new NHS projects, recruited, processed hundreds of website updates and celebrated a Christmas / New Years!

Christmas 2016

Finding the time to write new blogs posts and update our website (portfolio page) has been difficult, but this is something we are working on so please stay tuned – thank you for visiting.

In a recent project which involved WordPress we needed to implement different page templates. The spec was to have a page with a sidebar and one which was full screen without a sidebar. Luckily for us WordPress incorporates a system to achieve this. The method behind this is also fairly simple to complete and allows for a great degree of flexibility.

So first things first your going to want to make a duplicate file of the standard page.php. This default page can be either of the two templates that we want. The WordPress twenty fifteen theme defaults to a sidebar included page. Lets continue with that in mind meaning our template will be the full screen version.

Now that you have a duplicate of the default sidebar page template you need to open it up in your editor. Above all of the content on the page insert a comment tag with the template name, like this:

<?php /* Template Name: Full Width */ ?>

Watch for capital letters as these are important and it wont work without them. The template name itself can be any selection of characters you like. To finish things off in the php file itself you will want to remove the default sidebar include.

Open up your style.css file so that we can add some specific styling for the new page template. This is needed because in the default theme the main content itself wont be 100% wide. Due to the fact that it had to surrender some of its width to the sidebar. Luckily when creating the page template WordPress creates a new class on the body tag. This class will take the form of .page-template-[file name], for example our file was called page-full-width.php meaning our class is .page-template-page-full-width. With this class we can specifically target the same element and overwrite the default code.

.page-template-page-full-width{
width:100%;
}

Now you have both the styles.css and your template file completed you need to save them. The style.css is easy enough but what do you call the template file? Always start with the word page and then add your prefix to it. Like as we used above page-full-width.php. It always helps to use a name linked to its purpose. Finally make a folder called page-templates and place it in the root directory of the theme. place any templates you create inside of this folder so our new template will go here.

To test if what you have done is working create a new page and look at the page attributes. In this section you should see a template title with a drop down underneath. Click this drop down and see if the template name you created is visible. Check out this image for reference:

I hope you enjoyed this quick WordPress tutorial, thanks for visiting…

In the industry that we are in, everything is pretty much digital, done online and emailed. As Mike will state on a daily basis, his inbox is forever full and pinging with fresh emails. Even in our personal life, we are constantly checking our phones for texts and emails. My boys have a toy telephone that has one of those vintage rotary dials. Bizarrely, they both know it’s a phone and that you need to put your finger in the dial to turn the numbers. I vaguely remember my parents having one of these phones many, many years ago, and picking it up and hanging up on the poor person on the other end of the line.

In this generation, telephone calls are now visual. The world is almost becoming more silent, as we are reading conversations, rather than having audible ones. Does this save time? Well that is probably relevant to the person. If I email my Mum, I will get a two liner sentence in return. Whereas if I pick up the phone or Facetime her, I’m guaranteed to be on the line to her for a good twenty to thirty minutes.

Dame Esther Rantzen, recently set up the brilliant free confidential helpline for elderly people, The Silver Line. It’s a 24 hour line, where older and isolated people can phone up and chat about anything. It’s such a simple, yet brilliant idea.

I do worry that sometimes, we are all guilty of heading straight to our emails, rather than picking up the phone and talking to someone. We have some clients, where our relationship is built over time by emailing. We are happy as long as the customer is happy, but it is so refreshing at times to have a one to one chat in person. Just recently, we have had two long term clients come to visit us for the first time in five years of knowing them, and it was so nice to put a name to a face.

Emailing and texting will always be an invaluable tool, but all humans need interaction. Sometimes picking up the phone or going to see someone will mean more than we know.

Well, it has been a while my Tidy Blog readers – In recent weeks (or should I say months) Tidy Design has been manic… If we then throw in (not literally) a new born baby, a complete property renovation project, moving house, copious client updates, several big meetings / projects and some biz development work, there has literally been no time to blog.

The youngest – Jamie Leon Ward

Firstly I must say a big thanks to my wingman Jordan Terry who has been putting in the hours. With several new and pretty big chapters started this year; Jordan has been an absolute legend manning the Tidy Design fort. Clients have certainly kept us busy this year, probably a little too busy at times, but this is a good thing – I would like to thank them all!

And on that note it is time for some more client work, we have lots to tick off our to-do list before month-end – Another busy week ahead…

Recently there has been a move away from traditional anchor text based links towards social signals, linkage and a clear focus on relevance and associations key to earning successful links. Here at Tidy Design, we firmly believe in creating great content that offers real value to users – and using this as a basis for earning links.

The importance of connecting interested customers with your business is what good marketing is all about. Links have their use as a medium to gain visibility online, but the bigger picture remains that of building awareness – getting people talking about what you do and the products and services your company has to offer.

Recently, the introduction of semantic search engine developments have led to changes in the way in which existing keyword strategies are employed in SEO work.

Semantics changes the way that search engines work, enabling Google to map associations between content to deliver more effective results to users. Key to this process of course is creating understanding around the type of content that the user intends searching for on your site.

Creating an association between why a user is searching for content and the information they are seeking enables Google to improve search engine results, offering suitable offers and guides alongside these.

The importance of clean data cannot be overestimated. The Penguin algorithm was introduced to help clear up spam links to aid clarity.

Search engines effectively reward those working in alignment with the new system, so relevance becomes increasingly important when it comes to creating good search results. Understanding of this factor enables you to market to your advantage.

In computing and comparing the relevance of different links in relation to the likeliness that they will be clicked on, font size, position and colour are all taken into account, in addition to the co-occurrence of words and phrases.

To enable Google to understand the meaning of words, it will look at pages that mention the same phrase to view what else is mentioned and build up word associations in context to assign authority to links as relevant.

Utilising Social Media such as Twitter can be a great way to reach people with your blog posts and fresh content, enabling you to specifically reach a certain target audience.

Google News is a free news aggregator provided and operated by Google Inc. It aims to organise all the world’s news, making it accessible to users, while providing a great online experience for those in search of timely, useful information. Operating via an automatic aggregation algorithm, Google News offers a brilliant opportunity to share your information and expertise with the world.

So exactly how do you arrange to have your website included on Google News?

First of all, it is essential that you can make a good case for inclusion into it. Emphasise the positive aspects of your website – including any awards you have received, the statistics achieved to date, and who currently links to your website.

Ensuring your website is news worthy and relevant is of course essential. It is highly recommended you also provide a historical background of your site, introducing your authors and editors too.

Secondly, there are certain technical requirements that need to be met.

Each page of your website displaying the full text of an article needs to have a unique URL. URL is an abbreviation of Uniform Resource Locator and it is the global address of documents and resources on the worldwide web.

It is important that the URL for your full text article does not change, since Google News is not able to include sites that display multiple articles at the same URL.

Similarly, the URL for each article needs to contain a unique number, consisting of no less than three digits. Do not use URLs with dates in them – this will prevent Google from crawling the site for new content, given that dates often change – and Google will be unable to detect the most current URL to be crawled as a result.

The three or more digits in your URL can be contained anywhere within in – they do not have to be at the end. The main consideration is that they do not resemble years.

The automated crawler that Google currently utilises can crawl regular HTML links to great effect, but is unable to crawl image links or those embedded in JavaScript.

If you would like assistance getting your website or blog into Google News then please do contact us, we would be delighted to help.

Big content that is expertly compiled and highly informative drives your business’ competitive edge, in contrast to the plethora of speedily compiled ‘quick win’ strategy content available on the web.

With longevity built into its structure, big content ensures lasting quality and is less easily replicated by your competitors. Innovative and forward-looking, its key function is to drive valuable customer traffic your way.

Big content represents a high degree of specialist knowledge. ‘Big’ does not necessarily refer to size or volume. Think instead in terms of expert knowledge and years of experience – of highly professional content that attracts exactly the audience you are seeking to engage with as a business – content that has real staying power in terms of building your presence on the web and increasing unique visitors to your website.

Providing work of lasting quality and value is something that we at Tidy Design feel passionately about.

By enabling you to show your customers just how much care and attention you have given to identifying and meeting their needs and expectations, our bespoke SEO campaigns represent a great investment for your business.

Content marketing is all about drawing attention to the content on your business website. Seeking engagement with that content is possible via a wide variety of social media forums across the web… A truly great SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) campaign is an ongoing process of generating fresh, informative compelling content and building relationships in the wider online community.

Blog posts, infographics and even videos can be used to convey valuable content to your potential customers. Intelligent use of social media can be used to direct customers and other interested parties towards your business, increase website traffic, brand awareness and build valuable relationships.

The importance of providing content of value on an ongoing basis forms an integral part of any successful SEO campaign, given that the relationship between content marketing and social media is essentially a symbiotic one.

So how is all this achieved exactly? Well, creating a personality and brand that people know and trust is, of course, key to any successful business. High online visibility – domain authority and desired rankings in search engine results – means that your potential customers can find you easily and effortlessly. Sustainable relationships resulting from ongoing great customer satisfaction and feedback mean that your customers are more likely to recommend your business to their family and friends.

At Tidy Design we work closely with our clients to research a business, identify your chief competitors and create a plan of action. Using link building and social media, we offer affordable SEO campaigns for small businesses. By means of ongoing implementation and measurement of outcomes we identify and report back to you on the success of your SEO campaign, as an ongoing process each month.

So if you are seeking a way to increase your online visibility and generate increased sales and brand awareness for your company, look no further than a great SEO campaign from Tidy Design. Why not contact us today to find out more on how we can help generate quality content and build relationships for your business.

Having an attractive, well designed website is, of course, essential to any business in today’s highly competitive marketplace. But have you ever considered how your business might go on to succeed in maximising online customer traffic, achieving the new and repeat business you truly deserve?

Here at Tidy Design, we believe that your company website should be fully utilised to gain maximum benefit for your business on an on-going basis. We offer a highly effective aid to generating increased business to your company website, helping your business to grow from strength to strength – even in today’s tough economic climate.

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is the active, on-going process of improving different aspects of a website in order to optimise it and direct valuable traffic to your website

By carefully establishing the purpose and nature of your business website, an experienced content writer can compile relevant and competitive articles that will direct valuable custom directly to your company website via the search results of Google, Yahoo and Bing.

Hiring a reputed and established website content writing service is of course vital to any successful SEO campaign. Here at Tidy Design, we are proud to offer all our SEO work in house and have chosen the services of published author, Kerry McPhail for all our content writing. Kerry is based locally and published her first book in July 2011, which is available via Waterstones, WH Smiths and Amazon. Kerry’s extensive creative writing experience feeds naturally into SEO content writing and she has considerable experience of direct and online marketing, gained through promoting her book. She has a keen eye for creating unique brand awareness and identifying clearly and succinctly the results her clients are each seeking to achieve. Working efficiently to exact client specifications, she thoroughly enjoys compiling SEO articles and blog posts that are already achieving increased customer traffic for the clients she has so far engaged with.

Search Engine Optimisation focuses on keywords (the phrases that people typically type into Google, Yahoo or Bing) in order to attract unique visitors to your business website. This results in increased business for you!

By looking carefully at both the internal and external aspects of your website, we at Tidy Design can ensure that your site is able to compete and see a return on your investment. We seek to offer visitors to your website high quality content.

We would be delighted to discuss our SEO service with you, so why not give us a call today or post your content writing questions below. Enjoy this post? Check out Content writers in Portsmouth, Hampshire

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Here at Tidy Design our mission is simple; to deliver a return on investment, be it for our customers or the staff we employ, working together we will do better. Each day we set out to offer our customers a quality service, the goal being to leave a long lasting and positive impression. Happy customers result in repeat business.

The staff we employ are very important to Tidy Design, our ethos is to look after each other and grow together. We aim to learn and do better in all aspects of life, this mindset is key to growth and development.

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